sustained byastrongbelief in social and political progress and human perfect-
ibility.Thismeant that aesthetic experiences had to be evaluatedtogether with
moral economies,thataestheticeducation came with specific assumptions
about emotional education, and thatafuturesocialist aesthetics had to treat cul-
ture and education not as distinct forms or contents but as part of an all-encom-
passing social and emotional habitus.
Scholars of Imperial Germanyagree on several points: that culture and ed-
ucation–or,rather,the discourses of cultivation, refinement,and betterment–
werecentral to the self-understanding of Social DemocracybeforeWorld WarI;
that culturaland educational associationsbecame important mediators between
individual socialization in working-classfamilies and collective socialization
intoadistinct class habitus;and that the appeals to bourgeois heritagefunc-
tioned at once asapowerful tool in establishingsocial legitimacy and asaseri-
ous obstacle to engaging with modern massand consumer culture.Furthermore,
there exists consensus thatthe pronouncementsonproletarian culture, which
more often than not meantliterature,often served to gloss over deeper political
divisions that first exploded in the revisionism debate, intensified with the war
credit debates duringthe waryears, and eventuallyled to the splitbetween SPD
andKPDin1918/19. Once again,acomparative perspective is helpful in recogniz-
ing the Europeangenealogies of this foundational belief in culture asauniversal
value and consideringthe socialist initiativesinother countries that likewise
gave riseto literary clubs,poetry magazines,autodidact writers,and,last but
not least,aworker intelligentsia. The historian Mark Steinberg, in his studies
on the proletarian imagination in prerevolutionaryRussia, describes remarkably
similar arguments, attitudes, and attachments that,drawing on theKantian sub-
lime asatool of human emancipation, includethe validation of the aesthetic as
an expressionofcommunity,the relianceonreligious symbols and folk tradi-
tions, and the belief in individual selfhood and human dignity.²⁰
Giventhe heightened significance attributedtoculturesince the Enlighten-
ment,itshould come as no surprise that its socialist appropriations have been
subjecttovastlydifferent interpretations. Since the 1970s, social historians
and literaryscholars have argued passionately,and oftenwith very contempo-
rary investments, about whether the workers’educational and culturalassocia-
tions emulated, imitated, or transformed bourgeois traditions; whether the so-
cialist faith in progress and science was merelyareflection of the spirit of
capitalism oralogical extension of coretenets of historicalmaterialism; and
See Mark Steinberg,Proletarian Imagination: Self,Modernity,and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–
1925 (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press,2002).
166 Chapter 8